Mar. 14, 2013
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Quincy Jones is 80 years old! / Larsen & Talbert for USA Weekend

by Edna Gundersen, USA TODAY

by Edna Gundersen, USA TODAY

BEL AIR, Calif. - Quincy Jones turns 80 on Thursday, a milestone he'll celebrate privately with his family. But the storied music impresario has too many friends, protégés, admirers and close business and charity associates to stop there.

He and British actor Michael Caine, born within minutes of each other on opposite sides of the Atlantic, will be toasted April 13 at an all-star benefit in Las Vegas. The close pals, who met 45 years ago when Jones was scoring the soundtrack for Caine's The Italian Job, will cut loose at a second shindig July 24 in London. Another glittery 80th bash for Jones rolls out July 21 in Montreux, with two more slated July 31 and Aug. 1 in Tokyo.

He may be 81 before the Champagne runs out.

"It's all over the world!" Jones marvels. He's quick to point out that the festivities are not retirement parties. "I'm not leaving yet. I look back and it feels like 20 people did this. It's been a life, man! And there's still a lot out there."

Jones will be doing more than blowing out candles this year. He's producing a half-dozen albums by mostly newbies, including composer/pianist Emily Bear, 11, and singer Nikki Yanofsky, 19. Another pairs bebop trumpeter Clark Terry and rapper Snoop Dogg.

His new artist management consultancy handles acts ranging from Pan-Asian girl group Blush to guitar prodigy Andreas Varady, 15. In August, he'll stage the World Peace Concert in Hiroshima.

Jones is also developing four Broadway shows, including one on his life story, and nine movies, from a biopic on Russian poet Alexander Pushkin to tales of Chicago gangsters. And he's composing a musical on the evolution of jazz, his life's passion.

One genre couldn't hold him, and Jones made indelible stamps in pop, rap, rock and indefinable fusions. He'll be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on April 18.

"Yeah, 27 years later," he says with a mock sneer. He presented the honor to Ray Charles, his best friend, at the inaugural ceremony in 1986 and has been passed over until now. "But I'm going to be a gentleman. I have a lot of friends there that I don't want to offend. And it's another chance to be in the family with all my brothers - James Brown, Jackie Wilson, people I came up with."

Jones, sipping wine and sampling veggies and guacamole left by his housekeeper, is perched on an ottoman in the huge round living room of his 20,000-square-foot hilltop home, designed by architect Gerald Allison, a fellow alum of Garfield High School in Seattle. Beams separate the domed ceiling into a dozen sections, representing the zodiac and the musical scale.

"In 500 years, we've had only 12 notes to work with," Jones says. "My quest was to hear what everybody has done with those 12 notes and to see what I could do with them."

Those notes took Jones to the Grammy Awards podium 27 times (from a record 79 nominations). He produced Michael Jackson's Thriller, the world's top-selling album, and the all-star We Are the World, the fastest-selling single ever. His name appears as a producer, composer, conductor, arranger or performer on more than 400 albums. He composed roughly 35 film scores.

He co-produced The Color Purple and introduced Oprah Winfrey to a national audience. She earned one of the film's 11 Oscar nominations. He also produced the Broadway version.

He was the first black conductor of the Academy Awards in 1971 and produced the telecast in 1996. TV credits include writing the Sanford and Son theme, the Emmy-winning Roots score and producing The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. He founded Vibe magazine.

The impulse to explore media, geopolitics, social activism, philanthropy and education started at age 13.

Alarmingly, Jones' earliest goal was to hook up with the criminal elements of Chicago's South Side, where his father was a carpenter.

"I wanted to be a gangster until I was 11," he says, flipping through a tattered paperback about underworld figures. "These guys were running the numbers racket in five-and-dime stores. Every day, I saw a dead body. The gangs were organized, very tight. They don't play."

"A gang caught me on the wrong street once and that's how I got my medal," he says, pointing to a scar on his hand where it had been nailed to a fence with a switchblade. "Chicago was rough. It made Harlem and Compton look like Boys Town. I thought it was glamorous: tommy guns and stogies and piles of money in back rooms. They were vicious criminals but we took it for granted, and that's sick."

Had a piano not shifted his focus, "I would have been dead or in prison," Jones says. "As soon as I started playing instruments, I started hearing other instruments, and I fell in love with orchestration. It always fascinated me."

In 1957, he studied composition with renowned teacher Nadia Boulanger in Paris, bringing a classical sensibility to his big-band experience.

"Nadia said she had to treat jazz musicians differently because they shack up with music first, then they court it and marry it later," Jones says. "I said I wanted to go all the way. Instead of just four trombones, four trumpets, five saxes and a rhythm section, I wanted brass, woodwinds, strings. I was digging into the orchestration of Ravel."

His talent and voracious ambition set the stage for decades of challenging and successful projects with the biggest names in entertainment.

"When you work with Ray Charles, Billy Eckstine and Frank Sinatra, and you tell them to jump without a net, you better know what you're talking about," Jones says. "Thank God I was ready for it."

Bono, who teamed with Jones on the Jubilee 2000 campaign to cancel third world debt, says, "No one has made music for six decades, where the sound of those recordings couldn't have been imagined 10 years before. I think Miles had five. But Q, it's six big ones. That's a different level of maestro."

Duality is at the heart of Jones and his best music, says the U2 singer, who hears "a coolness in the way those melodies are dressed, yet the rhythms are in heat. He's been old and young forever - so many years and styles behind him, but still young in the face he presents. He's way beyond establishment but still street. How does he do that? Duality.

"He's been in charge of who is in charge for so long," Bono adds. "If music has had The Chairman, The Boss, Duke, Prince, The King, well, then Quincy Jones is The President."

Ed Eckstine, former president of Mercury Records and son of late swing era singer/bandleader Billy Eckstine, started his career with an 11-year stint as executive vice president of Quincy Jones Productions.

"There must be 28 hours in his day," says Eckstine. "He really doesn't stop. I've known him my entire life and started working for him after he released Body Heat (1974), a transitional album that took him from soundtracks and big bands to the modern age of the record business. He asked me what I wanted to do. I said, 'be a producer.' He said, 'We already have one of those.'

"Quincy had enormous success building his empire, and I was fortunate enough to be his right-hand man," Eckstine says. "He laid the groundwork for my success. It was interesting to watch him in the studio. Just when you think he's not paying attention, he'd say, 'Try this,' and you'd see the voilà moment. He knows how to execute his vision. He's extremely creative, so freaking curious and one of the most positive people I know."

Upbeat and unflappable, Jones' pique flashes only on pet issues of injustice, war and music education, a chief concern of a 400-member consortium he's formed with schools, businesses and such artists as Carlos Santana and Herbie Hancock. He's partnered with Playground Sessions to bring music software to school kids. He's annoyed that the USA lacks a minister of culture (who's better qualified than Q?).

"America has the most beloved and most copied music in the world, and every country knows more about it than we do," he says. The knowledge gap goes beyond jazz or blues. Few rappers realize the genre sprang from West African griots through Delta slave songs to jazz poetry and the comedic trash talk of "the dozens." "I was rapping in 1939. It's old. The roots are complex. And kids don't know."

Jones also gets perturbed on the subject of his most famous studio partner, Michael Jackson, saying, "All these people talk about Michael, and they don't know a damn thing. They weren't there."

He declines to address the particulars of the late pop star's decline, but says, "It's a complicated story. When you get thrown out there at the age of 5, it's hard to take unless you're spiritually grounded."

Jones hasn't escaped misfortune. His mother suffered from mental illness. In 1958, a touring musical went belly-up, stranding him and his band in Europe for 10 months and leaving him with debts that took seven years to repay. A brain aneurysm in 1974 required two operations that left six steel pins in his head. Work stress and his failing marriage to third wife Peggy Lipton triggered a nervous breakdown in 1989.

And today?

"I've never been happier," says Jones, known as much for his social brio and libido as his work ethic. "I party. I got a master's degree in that."

He moves in a circle of stunning diversity, with friends ranging from Bill Clinton, Colin Powell, Jordan's Queen Rania and Nelson Mandela to Bono, Stevie Wonder and Barbra Streisand.

He has seven children, ages 20 to 60, from three wives and two girlfriends. He was romantically involved for six years with Lisette Derouaux, but they hit a snag on the issue of children.

"I can't have a rug rat right now, like cats and dogs, scratching all my (expletive) up," Jones says with a chuckle. "I'm done with that."

Always in search of harmony, Jones "fixed her up," introducing Derouaux to LinkedIn chief Jeff Weiner. They wed and had two children.

Jones is playing the field: "I have 22 girlfriends," he says. That's not a typo.